Random Rant: How Apple Tried to Ruin Don’t Stop Living!!!

Thumbs DOWN! How Apple Tried to Ruin Don’t Stop Living by Jonny Blair!

Random rant time again. OK so you’re thinking “what has this post got to do with travel?” but it has EVERYTHING to do with my travel lifestyle, and for that reason I’m happy to name and shame the WORST three companies to deal with when you are a traveler and blogger. Yes, I’m a tad angry and it has taken me 5 weeks to get round to posting this (you might have heard I’ve been backpacking in China quite a bit in the last few weeks). With this hat-trick there’s no chance of keeping the match ball I’m afraid!! These three companies suck big time!! Hope you all go bankrupt, guys 😉 The main culprit is Apple. The other two companies are Air Asia and PayPal, but first up today, it has to be Apple. Yes the computer/technology company. Believe it or not I used to work for Apple. I was employed by an agency doing PR for Apple back in 2006 – 2007. I haven’t written much about it because Apple thought they were so fucking cool and one of their bosses didn’t even have the balls to complain about a previous blog post I did on them – she contacted an old friend of mine through Facebook (professional, eh?) and asked him to message me and remove the blog post. I didn’t fully remove it – just took the photos down and some of the event details. They’re a bunch of wankers as I recently found out. A secretive brand with faulty goods, non existent customer service and yet a bafflingly good reputation has been built due to their impressive marketing scams. Hell, I even worked my ass off for them and helped build this reputation once upon a time! I still can’t believe that. When I left my PR stint as an outreach assistant for Apple in London, they gave me a FREE parting gift. Guess what it was? A 20 pounds iTunes voucher! And guess what? When I tried to download tunes on the voucher, I found out that the voucher had expired 6 months ago! I was backpacking in North America at the time, so I wasn’t going to bother hunting them down to moan. 6 years down the line and I decided for some crazy reason to buy an Apple MacBook Pro (really SHIT product I know and I have no explanation as to why I bought it). My previous two laptops both broke time after time and I got fed up of using Windows, so I thought I’d give Apple a shot again. I owned my MacBook Pro (shit product) for a whole TWO months until it broke. And I mean really broke. It turned itself off every time I was halfway through a blog post. Sometimes the screen froze, sometimes it just turned off, sometimes the screen went fuzzy. It was just shit. It was a terrible experience for me. I’m not being an asshole moaning here by the way – I’m a paying customer and this laptop cost me a lot of hard earned cash so I deserve at least a working product!!! It was a really bad time for me. Especially as I try to be one of the top travel bloggers out there – I’m constantly writing new material (got 26 draft posts as we speak) and for a few weeks any visitors to my blog or Facebook Page would have been thinking “this guy isn’t updating much any more, must have lost the passion.” Bollocks to that, I was highly passionate the whole time, I just couldn’t get online or updating. Apple tried to destroy me and they also tried to destroy “Don’t Stop Living”. They didn’t succeed and they won’t succeed, I’ll beat them. My first step was taking my Apple MacBook Pro to the Apple Store in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. I showed the computer to their “experts” (disguised by a badge that says “Genius” on it!), one of them takes the laptop away and comes back to say “it’s fixed”. I didn’t believe him, but oddly the computer actually turned on and stayed on for longer than 5 minutes and seemed to be working. I was shocked that it worked, but I said “thanks” and headed back to my current base (a mate’s flat in Hong Kong) to get typing my latest travel stories. The MacBook Pro lasted for about an hour before it shut down. Right in the middle of an important blog post. Absolutely outrageous. After this I was able to turn it on a few times, get 2 minutes of quick work done before it would crash again and the screen would become fuzzy. The month of May and almost all of June was a nightmare for me keeping this blog up to date as well as backpacking and working 6 days a week in 4 jobs. I visited the Apple Shops exactly SIX times trying to get it sorted. It cost me over 200 Hong Kong Dollars in transport fees, and hundreds more dollars in time and effort spent on my blog. In the meantime I tried in vain to get one of my old laptops working. It was simply broken and so I was offline. I had all my posts scheduled as I normally do so had a few days to play with while I backpacked in Chongqing. My girlfriend (Travelling Hong Kong Girl) stepped in and saved this travel blog for me. She bought a new laptop for her travels and leant it to me for almost a month. If I didn’t have her, I’d probably have destroyed Apple completely by now. Apple should be paying for my girlfriend’s laptop. I gave them another few chances. I called into a different Apple store to try and get my laptop fixed. They told me because I bought it elsewhere, I couldn’t get it fixed. I went nuts on them and got the managers out while screaming to other customers in the shop about how shit Apple are. I made a few videos (milder videos than my screaming and shouting episode) while in the shop and I will upload them onto my YouTube Channel (Apple will probably try to ban them, but you can’t hide the truth). In one of my videos on how shit apple are, I tell two Apple employees (at the end) that they both “work for the worst company in the world”. On Tuesday 2nd July, I arrived at the Apple Shop in Central on Hong Kong Island (I was just back from Jiangxi Province in China and also worked a full day in a kindergarten in between times). They had fixed my computer. It has worked for the last few days or so now, so fingers crossed. But I just don’t trust them. I asked at one point for them to just get me a new laptop as it would be easier for them, for me and for their reputation. But THEY REFUSED!! Instead they wasted tons of my hours and their hours trying to fix this dodgy laptop!! They even gave me three separate receipts detailing all the work they had carried out on my laptop!! When I totalled up the cost they claim to have spent it came to a staggering 15,000 Hong Kong Dollars, almost twice the price of the laptop in the first place. A truly baffling statistic. Wankers! I won’t ever buy an Apple product again and I urge you never to either. Tell your friends, family and everyone out there that Apple are SHIT.

It tastes juicy at the start, but once you get to the core and crunch the pips, you’ve had enough.

You owe me a LOT of time and money Apple, pay up please. I’m waiting. If you pay up, I might even take this blog post down and cancel sending it to over 50 other travel websites!! Safe travels one and all but avoid Apple. Shit company! Rant over – decent travel posts to follow!

Join 15,017 Monthly Readers! If you enjoyed this article and LOVE travel and SAVING money, get e-mail updates from Don’t Stop Living – a lifestyle of travel! (It’s Free) 😉 Jonny

Noted! We went with a Asus laptop it is extactly the same as the MacAir but weights .50lb more and it HAS a card reader and bigger drive. PLUS it was over half the price! What a headache you had to deal with, hope your computer problems are over!Hannah@GettingStamped recently posted…#2 of 10 – Most Anticipated: SCUBA Certification Utila, Honduras

Thanks Hannah. Hope you guys are enjoying being on the road. I can get angry easily and I go mad when I do. Apple got it bad and I actually forgot to mention they lied to me a few times while I was in their store as well. I saw that some other travel bloggers were using a MacBook Pro and well my last 2 laptops were Windows so I decided to go back to Apple. Once my anger got to squeaking point, I wrote this. I’ll get on with travelling and writing now. Off to Zhuhai tomorrow, Burma in 2 weeks then Africa for a Safari! Safe travels (and hope Adam’s having a beer!) Jonny

Traveled for a year and a half with a MacBook Pro that was already two years old. Zero problems. Replaced it with a MacBook Air. Also no probs. sounds like you got a lemon. They should have just replaced it.Tom Bartel recently posted…How Larry Berle Travels

Indeed Tom – a few other travel bloggers rave about them. Cant figure Apple out – they also took my best mate’s hard drive off him, with his stuff on it and gave him a new hard drive! Wont use them again and LOL about the Lemon comment. Safe travels and happy blogging! Jonny

That is quite a rant, you clearly have strong feelings about this. It sounds as though you’ve been let down badly and your views have formed over a long period of time and first hand experience.

I tend to find electronics have a shorter working life now compared to years ago. I’m mainly blogging on an Acer netbook. Very cheap at around £200 and has most functionality you would want. My main gripe is that even though it is only a few months old there are almost daily windows updates! These tend to take forever and slow things down a fair bit. I suppose that is an issue with Microsoft rather than Acer.

I always draft my blog posts on an Open Office text document first. I save it on my netbook and a USB stick so I have a back up. With regular back ups every few minutes I shouldn’t lose much data if things go pear shaped. I then cut and paste into my website. Then save and edit as I go along.

I’m not sure if you do the same but it might save some heart ache if you computer keeps shutting down unexpectedly.

Thanks for the comment The Guy, yes a bit of a rant, but its all genuine feelings and i was really angry so had to get it off my chest and put it out there – im sure some people will disagree but sure – its my blog!

I always save my posts offline as well The Guy – I write on the move all the time and covered my tips here: My tips for saving money updating blogs/using wi-fi but that doesnt help when DURING your typing the computer just turns itself off! Anyway im back up and running and have about 50 posts to write as I board a ferry to China! Safe travels. Jonny

Thought you might be interested that I did enter the field of Apple just over a couple of months ago. I got a Macbook Air and to be entirely honest I LOVE IT! So quick, good functionality and none of this persistent background or required updates you get all the time with Windows. If I had a Windows computer for a couple of months I’m sure it would already have slowed down.

Since you worked for Apple you clearly have a better insight than I ever will. I do wonder if you got unlucky with this Macbook Pro?

All Mac users I’ve spoken to have been very positive and had great customer service.

I guess we all learn from our experiences and when we have a bad one we never forget. I’d be interested to know what you use now and how it is going? (Always nice for me to have a back up idea in mind, just in case.)The Guy recently posted…A Moment Of Reflection Away From A Holiday

Hi The Guy, thanks for the comment – not sure if you read but this is the second MacBook I owned (in between I had a Dell and a Hewlett Packard) and both were atrocious breaking many times, I decided to give Apple one last chance with this one, but it’s cost me too much money so if it breaks again, I’ll be sticking to a non-Apple computer next time! Safe travels. Jonny

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Jonny Blair is a travel writer, teacher and barman. Jonny lives in Poland and is recovering from mental health problems caused by liars. Jonny still wants to travel and inspire others but be careful who you trust.Jonny was recently in Gdańsk, POLANDHe last backpacked in Kaliningrad City, KALININGRADNow Jonny Blair lives in Gdańsk, POLAND
Number of continents visited: 7
Number of countries visited: 165 (including disputed countries)
Number of cities/towns visited: 1153 NOT OUT!
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